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Then, like many who fell ill with the plague, he seemed to make a sudden recovery. His wife served him a bowl of hot, fragrant wheat soup with red chili, a recipe that was popular across the villages of Mingheria. (Bayram Effendi had only ever left the island once in his entire life.) After he’d had his soup, sipping at it slowly as if it were some kind of elixir, and recited some of the prayers the fat holy man had suggested, he felt better.

He must go and make sure they didn’t make any mistakes with the prisoner count tonight. He would not be gone for long. So he’d said, as if he were talking to himself, when he had left his house for the last time without even a farewell to his family—as if he were merely heading for the privy in the garden. His wife and daughter did not believe that he had recovered and wept as they watched him go.

Around the time for evening prayers, Bayram Effendi first made his way toward the shore. He saw horse-drawn carriages, doormen, and gentlemen in hats waiting outside the Hotel Splendid and the Hotel Majestic. He walked past the offices of the ferry companies that operated routes to Smyrna, Chania, and Istanbul and around the back of the customs building. When he reached the Hamidiye Bridge, his strength ran out. He thought he might fall over and die. It was the time of day when the city was at its liveliest and most colorful, and under the palm trees and the plane trees, on the sunny streets, and among all those people with their warm and friendly faces, it seemed that life was, perhaps, quite good after all. Under the bridge flowed the Arkaz Creek, its waters a celestial shade of green; behind him was the historic covered market and the old bridge; in front of him was the Castle whose prisons he’d guarded all his life. He stood there for a time, quietly weeping until he was too exhausted to do even that. The orange light from the sun made the Castle look even pinker than it was.

With one last effort he walked in the shade of palm and plane trees down the dusty street with the Telegraph Office, and all the way back to the shore. He crossed the old city’s meandering alleys, near the buildings dating from the Venetian era, and entered the Castle. Witnesses would later say they saw the guard attending the prisoner count outside the door to dormitory number two, and drinking a glass of linden tea in the guards’ recreation room.

But no one saw him again after nightfall. A young guard had heard someone crying and screaming in a cell on the floor below around the same time the Aziziye was approaching the port, but had forgotten about it in the ensuing silence.

CHAPTER 4

Once it had dropped off Abdul Hamid’s Royal Chemist Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant on the island of Mingheria, the royal vessel Aziziye continued at full speed toward Alexandria. The task of the Ottoman delegation aboard the ship was to counsel China’s angry Muslim community against joining the surge of popular anti-Western uprisings in the area.

In 1894, Japan had attacked China, and the Chinese army, still wedded to traditional methods, had suffered a rapid and comprehensive defeat at the hands of the more westernized Japanese forces. Desperate in the face of Japan’s triumphant demands, the empress dowager of China had called on Western powers for help, just as the Ottoman emperor Abdul Hamid II had done twenty years before in the aftermath of a heavy defeat at the hands of the more modern Russian army. The British, the French, and the Germans had come to China’s aid. But in the process, they also acquired a series of mercantile and legal privileges (the British in Hong Kong and Tibet, the French in southern China, and the Germans in the north), dividing the country into colonial territories and deploying missionaries to enhance their political and spiritual influence.

These various developments had inflamed the impoverished Chinese populace, particularly the more conservative and religious among them, and ignited a series of uprisings against the Manchu government and against “foreigners,” especially Christians and Europeans. Western workplaces, banks, post offices, clubs, restaurants, and churches were set on fire. Missionaries and Chinese people who had converted to Christianity were picked off one by one and murdered on the streets. Behind this rapidly spreading popular protest movement was a sect Westerners referred to as the Boxers, who drew their strength from the mystical allure of the traditional sorcery and sword rituals they practiced. Caught between conservatives and more tolerant liberal elements, the Chinese government was unable to defeat the rebels, and to make matters worse, the army gradually began to side with the insurgents. Finally the empress dowager herself joined the anti-foreign uprising. By the year 1900, Chinese soldiers were blockading foreign embassies in Peking while angry mobs wandered the streets attacking Christians and killing foreigners. Before the Western powers managed to assemble an allied army to send to the rescue, the German ambassador von Ketteler, who had taken a particularly aggressive stance, was killed in the fighting on the streets.

The German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II retaliated in exemplary fashion, sending newly formed German army battalions to suppress the revolt in Peking. As he saw his soldiers off at Bremerhaven, whence they would make their way to China, he instructed them to be “as ruthless as Attila the Hun” and to take no prisoners. Western newspapers had long been filled with reports of the savagery, the primitiveness, and the murderous rampages of the Boxer rebels and the Muslims who had joined them.

Kaiser Wilhelm II also sent telegrams to Istanbul requesting Abdul Hamid’s support. The soldiers from the Kansu region who had killed the German ambassador in Peking were Muslims. In Kaiser Wilhelm’s view, the Ottoman emperor Abdul Hamid, caliph of all Muslims the world over, should do something to help subdue these deranged Muslim soldiers who were blindly attacking Christians. Perhaps he could add some of his own soldiers to the armies of the West that were being deployed to quash the uprisings.

It was not exactly easy for Abdul Hamid to say no to the British, who had protected him against the Russian armies; the French, who were Britain’s allies in China; and the Germans and their Kaiser Wilhelm, who had visited the Sultan in Istanbul and had always treated him with warmth. The Sultan was also aware that if these great powers were to find common ground, they could easily gobble up the Ottoman Empire—what the Russian czar Nicholas I had called “the sick man of Europe”—carving out its territories among themselves and facilitating the formation of countless separate states upon its lands, each speaking its own language.

Abdul Hamid had been watching the progress of these Muslim uprisings against Western superpowers—the so-called Great Powers—with mixed feelings. From what he had been able to glean through the reports he received, he was particularly intrigued by the many Muslim uprisings that were taking place in China and by the actions of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in India, who was leading the Muslims there in a revolt against the British. He was also sympathetic to the Mad Mullah’s rebellion in Somalia and the various anti-Western Muslim-led rebellions taking place throughout Africa and Asia. The Sultan had deployed special military attachés to track these anti-Western and anti-Christian movements, and in some cases he would also surreptitiously provide them with material support, unbeknownst even to his own government and bureaucratic cadres (for there were spies everywhere). As the Ottoman Empire unraveled, losing its Orthodox Christian populations across the Balkan states and on its islands in the Mediterranean, Sultan Abdul Hamid began to warm to the notion that if he was seen to openly favor Islam (as the new demography of the Empire was already suggesting), he might be able to rally the world’s many Muslim communities and nations to stand with the Ottomans against the West, and at least give the Great Powers something to fear. In other words the Sultan was beginning to discover all by himself that force which we now call “political Islam.”

But the opera-loving, crime novel–reading sultan Abdul Hamid was not exactly a sincere and steadfast Islamist jihadist either. When Egypt’s Ourabi Pasha had staged his rebellion against the West, the Sultan had understood straightaway that it was a nationalist uprising aimed not just against the British but against all foreigners—including the Ottomans—and he had loathed the Islamist pasha for it, secretly hoping the British would obliterate him. As for the Mahdist movement in Sudan, which had fought the British doggedly and culminated in the death of their beloved Major General Charles Gordon—a popular figure among Muslims too, who had affectionately called him Gordon Pasha—the Sultan had deemed it “a revolt of the hoi polloi” and, partly under pressure from the British ambassador in Istanbul, had sided with the British against it.

In the end Abdul Hamid managed to find a painless compromise between the conflicting urgencies of making sure he did not provoke the Western superpowers and of showing the world that he was the caliph and leader of all Muslims everywhere: he would not send any Ottoman soldiers to fight and kill Muslim insurgents, but as their caliph, he would send a delegation to China to tell the Muslims there: Don’t wage war on the westerners!

The head of this delegation, who was currently in his cabin and struggling to fall asleep, had been personally selected by Abdul Hamid, and alongside this experienced army general, the Sultan had appointed two clerics he also knew and held in great esteem, one of whom—black bearded—was a teacher of Islamic history and the other, white bearded, a renowned and gifted scholar of Islamic law. These two clerics would sit in the Aziziye’s spacious central cabin, across from an enormous map of the Ottoman Empire hanging on its wall, and spend the whole day debating how best to reason with China’s Muslims. One of the clerics, the historian, argued that the delegation’s real mission was not to pacify the Chinese Muslims but to teach them about the true might of Islam and of its caliph Abdul Hamid. The other cleric, the white-bearded jurist, was more prudent, arguing that a jihad was only a “proper jihad” if it could count on the support of that country’s king or sultan, and pointing out that by then the empress dowager of China had already changed her mind about supporting the rebels. The committee’s other delegates, translators and army men, would sometimes join the debate too.

At midnight, as the Aziziye sailed toward Alexandria under the moonlight, Doctor Nuri noticed that the torches in the central cabin were still alight and took his wife to look at the map hanging on its wall. It was an updated map of the Ottoman Empire, first established by Princess Pakize’s great-great-grandfathers six hundred years ago. Abdul Hamid had commissioned the map in the autumn of 1880—four years after he’d taken the throne aged thirty-four—in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin, when the Ottomans, with the help of the British, had taken back some of the lands they had lost to the Russians. The Ottoman Empire had lost control of many of its territories (Serbia, Thessaly, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, Kars, Ardahan) in the war that had broken out as soon as Abdul Hamid first took power. Following this debacle, the Sultan had convinced himself that it was the last time anything like this would ever happen and that the Empire would not lose any more of its possessions, and thus proceeded to dispatch trains, carriages, camels, and ships to carry the new map he had optimistically commissioned to the farthest reaches of the Empire, its military garrisons, its governors’ offices and foreign embassies. The delegates of the Guidance Committee had seen this map many times before all over the Empire—whose lands stretched from Damascus to Ioannina, from Mosul to Thessaloniki, from Istanbul to the Hejaz—and each time they had looked in wonder and veneration upon the enormity of the area covered by Ottoman rule, only to remind themselves that, unfortunately, the true map continued to shrink at an ever-increasing rate.

I shall take this opportunity to note here a rumor about this map that Princess Pakize had first heard in the Yıldız Palace, and which she now relayed to her husband and later recalled again in a letter to her sister. According to this story, Abdul Hamid had entered his beloved eldest son Prince Selim’s quarters unannounced one night and was delighted to find the boy—who was around ten or eleven at the time—studying a smaller-scale version of the very map the Sultan had commissioned. The Sultan noticed that some territories on the map had been colored black, the way children do in their coloring books. Upon further inspection, it became clear that the lands his son had crossed out were those that Abdul Hamid had lost during his reign, or that—though they might still fly the Ottoman flag and appear on the map as Ottoman possessions—he had handed over to the enemy without a fight, and the moment he realized this, Abdul Hamid instantly began to hate this treacherous child who apparently held his own father responsible for the Ottoman Empire withering into nonexistence. Princess Pakize, who loathed her uncle just as much, added that Abdul Hamid’s hatred for her cousin—his son—intensified ten years later when a concubine that the Sultan had his eye on was found to have fallen in love with Selim Effendi.

As a child, the Princess had overheard many conversations about the various catastrophes and territorial losses that had begun in the years immediately following the deposition of her father Murad V. As blue and green uniformed Russian troops had approached San Stefano, just four hours from Abdul Hamid’s palace, squares and parks and empty, burned-down plots of land in Istanbul had filled with tents the army had provided for the fair-skinned, green-eyed Balkan Muslims who’d been dispossessed overnight as they fled the Russian army, and in the space of fourteen months, the Ottoman Empire had lost most of the territories it had held in the Balkans for the past four hundred years.

The newlyweds spoke dispassionately of the other disasters they had heard discussed during their childhoods: to the east of the very island of Mingheria they had just left in their wake was the island of Cyprus, which, with its fragrant orange orchards, its groves of fruitful olive trees, and its copper mines, had been taken over as a British protectorate before the Congress of Berlin in 1878 was even over. Contrary to what Abdul Hamid’s map implied, Egypt too had long ceased to be an Ottoman possession. Although it still appeared as an Ottoman territory on the map, the British had in fact invaded it in 1882, after their warships had bombarded Alexandria with the excuse that Ourabi Pasha’s anti-Western uprising there was a threat to the local Christian population. (On days when Abdul Hamid’s suspiciousness verged on paranoia, the clever sultan would wonder if the British had perhaps instigated this particular Islamist uprising to create the excuse for an invasion.) Meanwhile, in 1881, the French had taken control of Tunisia. Just as Czar Nicholas of Russia had predicted forty-seven years before, all that the Great Powers had to do to share the inheritance that had fallen from the grasp of “the sick man” and into their laps was simply to work with one another.